Abide in me; and, I, in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am The Vine; you are the branches. He who abides in Me—and, I, in him—he it is that bears much fruit; for, apart from Me, you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in Me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and, the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in Me, and My Words abide in you: ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this, my Father is glorified: that you bear much fruit and so prove to be My Disciples.

— John 15:4-8 (RSV)

For, The Wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress The Truth. For, what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Ever since The Creation of The World, His Invisible Nature—namely, His Eternal Power and Deity—has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So, they are without excuse; for, although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to him; but, they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged The Glory of The Immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, animals or reptiles. --- Therefore, God gave them up—in the lusts of their hearts—to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged The Truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than The Creator, Who is Blessed forever! amin

— Romans 1:18-25 (RSV)

Suppose, from my lips poured forth the story of a man: a man himself with a beginning and an end; among a people like ours, itself with a beginning and an end; and, in a time and place like ours, each also with a beginning and an end. Hereafter, let's refer to this man as "Guy".

Regardless of its end and beginning, such a story would surely comprise merely a portion of Guy's whole life; although, perhaps, it could also tell Guy's story in full.

Nevertheless, how would this man—a creature, a word, an idea—know me: the creator who scribbled him into existence, who—with the simple word "Guy"—pulled him from non-being to being?

In his childhood, before words caged his wonder: Guy knew the world through his skin. Morning light created golden pools on his mother's kitchen floor, warm beneath his bare feet. His father's hand—callused, enormous, impossibly strong—rested on his shoulder as they stood together watching stars emerge from twilight's veil. The taste of his grandmother's cutlets carried stories he could not yet name: her village, her mother's mother, the perpetual cycle of intergenerational nourishment. When rain drummed against the roof and thunder rolled through his small chest, he firmly pressed himself against his mother's side for refuge against the world's terrifying vastness. He did not think about these things; yet, like a fish suspended in water without any knowledge of air, he simply lived within them.

But, adolescence birthed his hunger for explanations. Guy's teachers and scholars—learned, articulate, certain—offered him frameworks that seemed to illuminate everything. They explained that the butterflies he would later feel were merely neurochemical cascades, evolutionary mechanisms ensuring reproductive success. "Love," they said, "was oxytocin and vasopressin, elegant machinery selected for pair-bonding." Beauty? Just pattern recognition heartlessly optimized over millennia to detect nutritious fruit and healthy mates. Consciousness itself emerged from sufficient neural complexity, no different than the weather patterns arising from atmospheric chaos. Even, the meaning he found in his grandmother's cutlets—the pain of nostalgia—reduced to memory circuits firing, nothing more.

These explanations intellectually satisfied Guy. Elegantly austere, they along with their completeness seemingly left no remainder. Now, fluent in the secret language of naming the mechanism behind each experience: he walked through world with his nose up to the heavens, confident and cold.

Then, his mother passed away.

He sat beside her during those final hours, holding her hand when her shallow breath ultimately ceased. The scholastic explanations crowded his mind: biological systems failing, cellular processes terminating, the inevitable entropy of complex organization. All true, he supposed. Yet, as he sat in the silence where her laughter used to be, he confronted something that no explanation could quite capture. The mechanics accounted for the cessation but not the loss. They described the biology but missed the person. They explained everything except what truly mattered.

Years passed. Guy met the woman who would reorder his existence. When she smiled at him for the 1st time, his stomach erupted with those butterflies of which his professors prophesied. "Yes," he thought, "neurochemicals". Yes, evolutionary imperatives. But, also something else: something that somehow hollowed out his scholars' complete explanations like maps that captured every geographic detail yet missed the territory's soul.

They married and built a life together. He would wake some mornings to find her watching him sleep; and, in her gaze, he encountered something the textbooks never mentioned: the way 2 consciousnesses could interpenetrate and co-create a 3rd thing that neither could independently produce until the boundaries between self and other fully dissolved. Their private language of gestures and half-phrases. The way her grief became his grief; her joy, his joy.

They aged together. Her hair silvered, and his bones complained. They buried friends, celebrated grandchildren and watched the world transform in ways their younger selves could never have imagined.

Then, she also departed from this life.

Guy—now ancient, now cheerfully awaiting his own end—sits in his garden as songbirds playfully rejoice around him. The scholars' voices still echo in his memory, their explanations still true as far as they went. But, across the ark of his life, he had realized something that they could never teach him. For all their precision, the explanations were akin to using acoustic physics to describe the lovely birdsong that accompanied his contemplation. Accurate, perhaps, but missing the essential. The equations captured the sound waves but not the music.

Would he not have perceived the consequence of my words—the energies capturing my essence—when he looked up at those childhood stars?

Or, when his child called him "Papa" for the first time, and he felt his identity reconfigure around this impossibly tiny responsibility?

Or, when he tasted sambar, malva pudding or, even, just an old piece of dry bread—each of which narrates the entire history of his becoming?

Or, when the beat dropped and the birds sang, weaving beautiful sounds that the scholars insisted was just auditory processing?

Or, when his mother lovingly comforted him after he scraped his knee, failed an exam and learned he did not get the job—her presence somehow transcending mere mammalian nurturing behavior?

Or, when he met the girl with whom he would spend his life and butterflies—full of joy and hope—inexplicably pranced through his stomach?

Or, when his wife of 50 years passed away of old age, and he recognized: real grief testifies to a love the most complex evolutionary narratives cannot exhaust?

Surely, he—like you and me—will meet his end.

But, what constitutes a good end?

Is it the sum total of happinesses and pleasures he experienced and accumulated like the parsimonious measures the coins in his purse?

Or, the resources he gathered, the securities he built, the comforts he ensured?

Nay, perhaps, just perhaps...I posit: Guy's greatest and best end, his good end, consists of knowing me—the one who created him—as i want him to know me; of abiding in me as i am in him.

Neither through formulaic proofs nor through transcending his embodied existence to escape his creaturely limits.

But, through the very experiences his scholars explained away: the taste and touch, the piercing beauty. Through knowing and being known, loving and being loved, participating in realities that mechanical explanations cannot describe. Through the traces i left in the fabric of his world, encrypted in experiences speaking the language older than words.

perhaps, just perhaps...

first time reading? please check out the sailing manual for helpful guidance!

Abide in me; and, I, in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am The Vine; you are the branches. He who abides in Me—and, I, in him—he it is that bears much fruit; for, apart from Me, you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in Me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and, the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in Me, and My Words abide in you: ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this, my Father is glorified: that you bear much fruit and so prove to be My Disciples.

— John 15:4-8 (RSV)

For, The Wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress The Truth. For, what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Ever since The Creation of The World, His Invisible Nature—namely, His Eternal Power and Deity—has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So, they are without excuse; for, although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to him; but, they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged The Glory of The Immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, animals or reptiles. --- Therefore, God gave them up—in the lusts of their hearts—to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged The Truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than The Creator, Who is Blessed forever! amin

— Romans 1:18-25 (RSV)

Suppose, from my lips poured forth the story of a man: a man himself with a beginning and an end; among a people like ours, itself with a beginning and an end; and, in a time and place like ours, each also with a beginning and an end. Hereafter, let's refer to this man as "Guy".

Regardless of its end and beginning, such a story would surely comprise merely a portion of Guy's whole life; although, perhaps, it could also tell Guy's story in full.

Nevertheless, how would this man—a creature, a word, an idea—know me: the creator who scribbled him into existence, who—with the simple word "Guy"—pulled him from non-being to being?

In his childhood, before words caged his wonder: Guy knew the world through his skin. Morning light created golden pools on his mother's kitchen floor, warm beneath his bare feet. His father's hand—callused, enormous, impossibly strong—rested on his shoulder as they stood together watching stars emerge from twilight's veil. The taste of his grandmother's cutlets carried stories he could not yet name: her village, her mother's mother, the perpetual cycle of intergenerational nourishment. When rain drummed against the roof and thunder rolled through his small chest, he firmly pressed himself against his mother's side for refuge against the world's terrifying vastness. He did not think about these things; yet, like a fish suspended in water without any knowledge of air, he simply lived within them.

But, adolescence birthed his hunger for explanations. Guy's teachers and scholars—learned, articulate, certain—offered him frameworks that seemed to illuminate everything. They explained that the butterflies he would later feel were merely neurochemical cascades, evolutionary mechanisms ensuring reproductive success. "Love," they said, "was oxytocin and vasopressin, elegant machinery selected for pair-bonding." Beauty? Just pattern recognition heartlessly optimized over millennia to detect nutritious fruit and healthy mates. Consciousness itself emerged from sufficient neural complexity, no different than the weather patterns arising from atmospheric chaos. Even, the meaning he found in his grandmother's cutlets—the pain of nostalgia—reduced to memory circuits firing, nothing more.

These explanations intellectually satisfied Guy. Elegantly austere, they along with their completeness seemingly left no remainder. Now, fluent in the secret language of naming the mechanism behind each experience: he walked through world with his nose up to the heavens, confident and cold.

Then, his mother passed away.

He sat beside her during those final hours, holding her hand when her shallow breath ultimately ceased. The scholastic explanations crowded his mind: biological systems failing, cellular processes terminating, the inevitable entropy of complex organization. All true, he supposed. Yet, as he sat in the silence where her laughter used to be, he confronted something that no explanation could quite capture. The mechanics accounted for the cessation but not the loss. They described the biology but missed the person. They explained everything except what truly mattered.

Years passed. Guy met the woman who would reorder his existence. When she smiled at him for the 1st time, his stomach erupted with those butterflies of which his professors prophesied. "Yes," he thought, "neurochemicals". Yes, evolutionary imperatives. But, also something else: something that somehow hollowed out his scholars' complete explanations like maps that captured every geographic detail yet missed the territory's soul.

They married and built a life together. He would wake some mornings to find her watching him sleep; and, in her gaze, he encountered something the textbooks never mentioned: the way 2 consciousnesses could interpenetrate and co-create a 3rd thing that neither could independently produce until the boundaries between self and other fully dissolved. Their private language of gestures and half-phrases. The way her grief became his grief; her joy, his joy.

They aged together. Her hair silvered, and his bones complained. They buried friends, celebrated grandchildren and watched the world transform in ways their younger selves could never have imagined.

Then, she also departed from this life.

Guy—now ancient, now cheerfully awaiting his own end—sits in his garden as songbirds playfully rejoice around him. The scholars' voices still echo in his memory, their explanations still true as far as they went. But, across the ark of his life, he had realized something that they could never teach him. For all their precision, the explanations were akin to using acoustic physics to describe the lovely birdsong that accompanied his contemplation. Accurate, perhaps, but missing the essential. The equations captured the sound waves but not the music.

Would he not have perceived the consequence of my words—the energies capturing my essence—when he looked up at those childhood stars?

Or, when his child called him "Papa" for the first time, and he felt his identity reconfigure around this impossibly tiny responsibility?

Or, when he tasted sambar, malva pudding or, even, just an old piece of dry bread—each of which narrates the entire history of his becoming?

Or, when the beat dropped and the birds sang, weaving beautiful sounds that the scholars insisted was just auditory processing?

Or, when his mother lovingly comforted him after he scraped his knee, failed an exam and learned he did not get the job—her presence somehow transcending mere mammalian nurturing behavior?

Or, when he met the girl with whom he would spend his life and butterflies—full of joy and hope—inexplicably pranced through his stomach?

Or, when his wife of 50 years passed away of old age, and he recognized: real grief testifies to a love the most complex evolutionary narratives cannot exhaust?

Surely, he—like you and me—will meet his end.

But, what constitutes a good end?

Is it the sum total of happinesses and pleasures he experienced and accumulated like the parsimonious measures the coins in his purse?

Or, the resources he gathered, the securities he built, the comforts he ensured?

Nay, perhaps, just perhaps...I posit: Guy's greatest and best end, his good end, consists of knowing me—the one who created him—as i want him to know me; of abiding in me as i am in him.

Neither through formulaic proofs nor through transcending his embodied existence to escape his creaturely limits.

But, through the very experiences his scholars explained away: the taste and touch, the piercing beauty. Through knowing and being known, loving and being loved, participating in realities that mechanical explanations cannot describe. Through the traces i left in the fabric of his world, encrypted in experiences speaking the language older than words.

perhaps, just perhaps...

first time reading? please check out the sailing manual for helpful guidance!